But I’m not exactly a fanboy of the semantic web, and I wasn’t sure how the audience would respond to some of my more provocative assertions. Fortunately the reception was very positive. Several people approached me afterwards to thank me for presenting a balanced argument for combining big data with structured representations and for raising HCIR issues.

A couple of people felt that faceted search was old news. I’m delighted that faceted search is becoming increasingly common, but there is still a lot of opportunity to use it more often and more effectively, And I was pleasantly surprised at the interest in discussing extensions of faceted search to address relationships between entities, as well as other nuances. I’ll have to dive into those in future posts.

For now, I hope you enjoy the slides, and I encourage you to ask questions in the comments.

I work at LinkedIn. Before that, I work on local search quality at Google. And before that, I was the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Endeca, a leader and pioneer in enterprise information access. And before that, I studied computer science and math, obtaining undergraduate degrees from MIT, and a PhD from CMU. I am passionate about information retrieval and information science, and also ...